Andreas plays Adventurers Consumer Guide
This IF comes recommended to me by Emily Short herself. As it proceeded me ranting about Blue Lacuna making me rage-quit, I’m not yet sure whether this recommendation will be an honest one, or a “So you like BAD IFs, huh? Well, here’s one that will Blue Lacuna look awesome by comparison.” kind of recommendation.
Also I’m trying to get used to a new type of keyboard (for ants), so if I’m not writing as much, or you notice any tyops, that’s why.
Adventurer’s Consumer Guide
You are a product tester for the …
…aaand textdump. Is this what Emshort meant by brief IFs? I hope not. Hopefully this intro will just be little over one page long. There’s backstory, briefing, dialogue, instructions, and pointers to help commands, so it’s still keeping things short.
It is possible to put this game in an unwinnable state,
“…yet we didn’t feel any need to remove said state, because we felt that it contributed to the game.” Well, I’ve missed a certain mailbox in Cryptozookeeper, so how bad can it be, right?
Oh, good: The dump only lasted for one page. Now where are we? On a mountain ledge? As an example of a brief IF, was the “You’re writing an article for a magazine.” backstory really necessary? “You’re lost in the mountains with a goblin.” would have gathered my interest much faster than the Paranoia™ style intro.
[Somewhere here two transcripts happen, and I lose my will to type, so the rest is just me jumping straight to a boring conclusion. Will only post the commented transcripts at request, because they’re mostly boring.]
At the end of the second transcript, I’ve had enough. It’s not that the game is worse than Blue Lacuna. It’s the keyboard I have to put up with, that’s ruining it for me. Also, while it was fun to revisit Paranoia, this wasn’t what I meant with using less words. I welcome the simplified interface – I’m working on an identical one myself – but doing away with “examine” was too much. ACG is on the same level as any other IF: it’s a normal piece of IF, while I was hoping to play something extremely brief as an example. My complaint for Blue Lacuna, was that it was bordering on a CYOA, and in that regard ACGs was exactly that: A narrow choice of which item to use – just even less locations. Instead of five locations offering three blue choices each (in Blue Lacuna), I get EIGHT choices following me around wherever I go.
I also suspect that letting the gremlin out of the cage, was me setting the game to an unwinnable state, and if that was the case, I would have been pissed, so me quitting now, is preemptive troll-prevention.
I guess I
M going to have to show you all how it
S done later, when my IF is finally released somewhere around the year 3015 when robots rule the world.
(Freaking keyboard!)
